Invisible Art Show is Filled With Jokes in London: Review

"Breath, floating in color as well as black and white (Venice)" (2010-2011) by Bruno Jakob. The artist has been making invisible paintings for over 30 years. Photographer: Linda Nylind/Hayward Gallery via Bloomberg

You can indeed discern a stylistic development in non-visible work similar to that which is familiar in painting,
sculpture, installation and more conventionally perceptible
forms of visual art.

Andy Warhol created an invisible sculpture at a New York
night club in the mid-1980s. It consisted of a label reading,
“Andy Warhol, USA/Invisible Sculpture/Mixed Media 1985.”

He stood next to this for a short while then went away.

Cursed Space

In 1992, Tom Friedman went one better by creating an
invisible sculpture, with added unseen lurking menace. This is
again an empty pedestal, with above it a spherical ritual space
cursed by a professional witch.

It’s not clear whether this piece ought to carry the occult
equivalent of a health-and-safety warning (“Caution: Malign
Magical Spell Hazard”). Both the Warhol and the Friedman are in
the exhibition, though obviously not on view.

Some pieces in the exhibition are less visible than others.
Claes Oldenburg’s “Proposed Underground Memorial and Tomb for
President John F. Kennedy” (1965) would actually have been
observable if it had been constructed, albeit only partially and
with difficulty.

It was to have consisted of a hollow bronze casting the
size of the Statue of Liberty, buried upside down with an
opening “about the size of a golf ball” in the ground above.
Through this, spectators could have peered at the interior while
kneeling or lying on their stomachs.

No Art

In comparison, the Taiwanese-born performance artist
Tehching Hsieh has achieved such levels of negative achievement
that he makes mere invisibility look un-avant-garde.

His penultimate work, the last of five one-year
performances, “No Art Piece” (1985-86) took the form of the
artist not seeing, making, talking or reading about or otherwise
having anything to do with art for 12 months.

He followed this with “Tehching Hsieh 1986-1999 (Thirteen
Year Plan),” in which he made art but in secret without
exhibiting it in public or revealing what it was.

The invisible tradition goes back to the French artist,
Yves Klein, who in 1958 exhibited an entirely empty gallery in
Paris, which he claimed to be crammed with an immaterial “blue
sensibility.”

Klein subsequently sold collectors “zones of immaterial
pictorial sensibility” in exchange for gold, some of which he
threw in the River Seine (and some not).

Now, there’s a sharply pointed metaphor for a lot of
things. It’s not only the art world that deals in imperceptible
value. Just now the European economy, for example, is full of
it. The irony is that Klein’s certificates transferring
ownership of intangible zones might prove to have been a better
investment than Greek government bonds.